Former Google execs tackle Web security

A former Google security engineer — Neil Daswani — has co-founded a company called Dasient to defend Web sites against attacks from malicious code.

Dasient will offer free tools that can scan Web sites for malware and warn companies, or their Web hosters, that a site is in danger of being blacklisted by Google or similar services.

Blacklisting makes a site inaccessible, sometimes for several days.

For a fee, companies can also get the malware analyzed in detail and find out which parts of a site are infected. Or they can pay to get the site quarantined and cleaned.

Attacks on Web sites have been rising sharply for the last year or two — Microsoft estimates that 1 million sites a month are now attacked.

Web sites use more complex code than they used to and the code has more flaws, said Dasient co-founder Ameet Ranadive, a former engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Furthermore, less experienced programmers are creating these sites and they make mistakes, which makes sites even more unsafe.

Attackers, meanwhile, are using automated tools to find these flaws, and they are also able to construct malware that is capable of analyzing each PC that visits a site to see how it can be attacked. Dasient’s tools might stop such attacks before they could proceed.

Dasient has raised $2 million from three Silicon Valley investors — Stratton Sclavos, the former CEO of Verisign; Eric Benamou, the former CEO of 3Com; and Mike Maples Jr., whose other investments include Digg.com and Twitter.

Dasient’s third co-founder is Shariq Rizvi, who was on Google’s Web server team and worked with Daswani.